


not all that have fallen are vanquished

by Nibelung



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Blind Character, Blindness, Female Luke Skywalker, Gen, Not A Fix-It, Rule 63, Time Travel, it does have both time travel and an alternate universe though
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-19
Updated: 2021-01-19
Packaged: 2021-03-17 09:08:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28846572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nibelung/pseuds/Nibelung
Summary: Time travel can show familiar things - and people - in an unexpected light.A Star Wars AU fanfic, based on George Lucas' January 1975 second draft and Ralph McQuarrie’s concept art of a female Luke Starkiller.
Kudos: 5





	not all that have fallen are vanquished

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally going to be a ficlet that I posted as part of the "Profoundest Hell" series. However, it got a little long and I liked it enough to showcase it as its own standalone fic.
> 
> I make no apologies for the various Dune references. ;)

The spiralling columns of the Jedi Temple atrium soared magnificently overhead, intertwining gracefully with the roof of the massive hall. From where Luke stood in a corner of the room, one hand pressed to the twisting trunk of a gigantic pillar, she could tell it was a magnificent sight.

She was sorry that she couldn’t actually _see_ it - not the way she could before she lost her sight in the lightsaber duel with Espaa Valorum. Valorum, the Sith Knight and her long-lost brother, who left the Rebellion to join what seemed like the winning side.

And she was sadder still because she knew that this Temple, a sacred place of learning and contemplation, would be destroyed with the rise of the Empire, its Jedi inhabitants slaughtered with a bare handful of survivors scattered to the winds.

Generations would be born knowing nothing but the Empire’s iron-fisted terror, in a time where peace and serenity were distant dreams, forgotten and ephemeral. For them the Republic seemed like something from a fairy tale, rather than a part of history that had once been real. Centuries had passed, and the fires of rebellion waxed and waned, yet still the Empire ruled.

That was why Valorum had joined the Sith: the long shadow of despair made hope difficult to sustain, and it was all too easy to abandon it as the vice of fools or madmen.

The downside of time travel, Luke reflected, was foreknowledge.

But the knowledge of what was to come was the reason she was here, marveling awestruck at this impossible past that was so very real.

Luke’s father, the Starkiller, the Jedi Master who struck such fear into the hearts of the Imperials, had been only a young Padawan when the Empire rose. And that had been some three hundred years before she was born. If he’d known what was to come, he’d told her, he would have done many things differently – including the oversight she’d undertaken this mission to correct.

Cradled in her other arm, the one she wasn’t using to feel the Temple’s breathtaking grandeur, was a small wooden box. Inside it was something more precious than latinum beads: the ilum crystals used to power Jedi lightsabers.

In her time, in the future, the Empire had a monopoly on these crystals – and, to secure that monopoly, the first planet the now-destroyed Death Star was tested on had been the very world where they were most in abundance.

Now, a single ilum crystal was more expensive than an entire fleet of starships. Which might not have mattered too much – but a surviving Jedi record of Force-sensitive bloodlines throughout the galaxy had made its way into the hands of both Empire and Rebellion alike. Back in Luke’s present, budding Force users were being recruited to swell the ranks of both sides, and for the first time in generations the Jedi had a chance of actually overthrowing the Empire’s tyranny.

But they couldn’t do it if they didn’t have lightsabers to fight with.

Which was why Luke had come on this desperate and dangerous mission in the first place. Why her father had protected her to the last, the venerable Starkiller finally meeting his death from a massed array of Imperial blasters… even as she threw herself through the portal, and found herself in another time, another world.

And now that Luke was here, standing in the flesh-and-blood reality of the old Republic, she understood as she never had before what drove her father to untiring resistance all those years, and ultimately to giving up his very life for this ideal.

Listening as the Jedi came and went in the hall of the Temple, each with their own purpose but all part of a larger whole, she felt reassured and at peace in a way she had never known. The Force _sang_ here. It spoke of contentment, and love, and fulfillment, with a strength and warmth Luke had never felt in her own time. It was like something that had slept within her for her entire life had joyously awakened. She sensed – _saw_ – for herself the benevolence and the splendor of this vanished world, and knew for the first time why her father had had such a burning desire to restore it into being.

It was, she thought, a Paradise.

Even with her mission largely accomplished, she had difficulty tearing herself away from this place, couldn’t bring herself quite yet to go back through the portal that had sent her here. Back to death and despair and tears. Back to the war.

It was like the mythology some worlds had, of a state of angelic perfection preceding a Fall. Luke was tempted to forget everything that had driven her here, the Sith and the Jedi and the war against the Empire, and stay in this moment of blissful peace. Even if it had to end at the point of a stormtrooper’s blaster or a lightsaber in a scant few years, she mused.

But she couldn’t. She had to return: back to the time portal that had dumped her into a disused storage chamber in the Temple basement, back to the world of strife and danger she’d escaped to savor this island of bliss. People were counting on her. She couldn’t let them down. Wouldn’t.

Tearing her hand away from the twisting column with almost violent force, she turned to retrace her steps back toward the storage chamber…

…and bumped into a short young person that she hadn’t noticed approaching from behind.

“Ow! Hey! Can’t you watch where you’re going?” said the voice of a young boy. “You… oh.” He broke off as she felt his gaze reach her face, and Luke knew he’d only just noticed her blindness.

“Obviously I can’t.” She felt herself stifling a grin; even without eyes she could practically feel the kid going red in the face with embarrassment. “So you’ll have to do it for me.”

“Oh. Okay. Sorry.” The boy let the stammered apology hang in the air for a second. But Luke could guess his guilty feelings would vanish, with all the ebullience of youth, just as quickly as they had come on. Her instincts were confirmed when he piped up again, this time without hesitation: “I don’t think I’ve seen you around here before. What’s your name?”

“I’m….” She paused, trying to think of a good pseudonym. Then she figured, the hell with it. She knew her own father’s legendary surname was one he’d chosen after the fall of the Temple, a war-name rather than the birthname of the Padawan he’d been. No harm in telling this kid the truth – he’d probably be dead in a couple years anyway.

“My name’s Starkiller. Nice to meet you, kid.” She stuck out her free arm to shake the boy’s hand. He grasped it enthusiastically, pumping away; his grip wasn’t strong, but his energetic motions told Luke that the kid wasn’t a full master of Jedi discipline quite yet.

Several seconds later than Luke would’ve liked, the boy finished his awkwardly enthusiastic handshake. “Cayne Dune, Padawan. Nice to meet you, Master Starkiller.”

It took all Luke’s strength as a Jedi not to let her astonishment show on her face.

Cayne Dune. That was the name her father had gone by, three hundred years ago. Before the fall of the Jedi Temple and the Empire’s rise.

This kid was her own father. This bouncing-off-the-walls snot-nosed kid. The Starkiller, scourge of the Sith, terror of the Empire.

The same father she’d just heard cut down by Imperial stormtroopers, an old man dying on the floor of an underground cave on a remote Outer Rim planet, urging her on with his last breath as she plunged desperately into the time portal they’d gone there to investigate.

For the sake of the galaxy, Luke had to accomplish the mission he’d given her. But it would be for nothing if this kid caught on to her, this boy who would grow up one day to be the father she loved and now mourned.

“I’m… I’m not a Master.” Luke struggled to keep the sudden rush of emotion out of her voice. “Listen – “

“Then how come I haven’t seen you here before?” her boy-father asked. “Masters don’t have to come back to the Temple except when they want to. Knights do, though.”

“Because… I’ve been on a special assignment the last few years. It’s top secret and really dangerous. It’s over now, though, so I’ve come back.” She shrugged with her free hand, hoping the casual gesture would suggest that her invented-on-the-spot cover story was really no big deal.

“Well… okay,” Cayne said slowly, evidently not entirely sure whether she could be trusted. “Is that how you lost your eyes? But how do you see when you’re fighting? With the Force? That must be hard.” Luke’s Force senses told her the boy was making a face of disgust. If she could actually see it, she’d probably burst out laughing.

“Yeah. You’re right, I see with the Force. And I have to admit, it was hard at first. But I had a good Master… and he taught me to use the Force to perceive my surroundings in a new way.” She pointedly avoided mentioning who the Master was – this same boy, three hundred years in the future – and hoped the kid wouldn’t pick up on that.

“Oh. Wow.” The Padawan paused again, as if considering how difficult such Force perception might be, then directed his attention to a new and less intangible topic. “But why do you have a box of ilum crystals?”

“I’m helping Master Grogi make some new training sabers for the crechelings. Remember, even before you picked out your crystals, how everybody had to have a lightsaber to learn with?” It was close enough to the truth, at least; the crystals would be used to train a new generation of Jedi to fight the Empire. And during her training sessions her father had told her some stories of how things had worked in the old Temple, before the Order fell – enough, she hoped, to fool a kid with a casual offhanded bluff.

Even so, it might not work. Luke desperately hoped the-boy-who-was-her-father wouldn’t sense her slight blurring of the facts. Force knew he’d been such an expert at sensing her inner feelings back in the present.

Back when he was alive.

She swallowed the lump of grief that tried to rise in her throat.

“Oh. Well, have fun!” Cayne nodded at her, and Luke could’ve sighed in relief. The kid had bought her story after all. Now she could return to the present and deliver the crystals. And then she and her friends could make swords for a new generation of Jedi, and bring hope to the galaxy again.

All because she’d managed to lie convincingly to this barely pubescent version of her father.

“It was nice meeting you, Starkiller,” Cayne ventured. Then he walked off toward the atrium center, evidently ready to continue whatever business had brought him into his future daughter’s path in the first place.

“Listen, kid…” she said, and he turned back to meet her sightless gaze.

“The galaxy is a dangerous place. Watch yourself.” With the arm not encumbered with the box of crystals, she gave the boy a salute, and a grin to go with it.

“I will. Don’t you worry!” The kid returned her gesture, then resumed his stride across the Temple atrium, a bit more spring in his step as he went.

As Luke Starkiller turned and went the other way, back towards the portal to her own time and to the war with the Empire, she blinked her blind eyes repeatedly as they threatened to well over. She still had a few more hallways to cross, after all, and it wouldn’t do to stand out among the Jedi of this vanished paradise by breaking down into a crying mess.

Afterward, when she’d made it back to the Rebel fleet, there would be plenty of time to shed her tears.


End file.
